Re: Exception trying to run FYM on vista

From: Aaron J. Grier
Date: 19:01 on 27 Sep 2007
Subject: Re: Exception trying to run FYM on vista
a followup from another group. plenty of hate here.
On Fri, Sep 21, 2007 at 12:22:13PM -0000, camrex_chi wrote:
> I think you will find that files in:> C:\Program Files\<FYMroot>\server1\ are not being read as you think.> > Instead it is reading the files located in:> C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program> Files\<FYMroot>\server1\> > At least that is what is supposed to happen, unless you have changed> some security setting that changes this. This is supposed to be a> feature of Vista. FYM will still work using this configuration, but> you have to remember that server downloaded files are stored in a> different location...not where you think they are. I have lost some> FYM data in the past because of this, though I thought I had backed it> up, but forgot to backup the "VirtualStore" folder.> > Microsoft actually advises that programs not try to store data in the> "Program Files". The "VirtualStore" is only a short-term measure till> programmers stop storing files there. I'm not exactly sure where they> suggest files are stored.
microsoft still doesn't have a concept of a home directory?
XP uses C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\
Vista uses C:\Users\<username>\AppData\
is there at least a consistent registry entry that stores this location?
I started using unix in the early 90s and "$HOME" and "~" seemed
well-established by then. there's still plenty of hate over where
underneath a user's home directory files should be written, but there
seems to be general consensus that programs get installed system-wide,
are users are allowed only a limited sandbox in the filesystem.
> The easy solution, as I see it, since FYM is used on Windows 98 to> Vista, that it stay the same, but Vista users should probably not> install in the Program Files directory. I use C:/FYM/.
an example of the kind of mess that users resort to for workarounds.
it's like the old DOS days.
if I have to deal with broken programs that assume they can scribble
anywhere on disk, at least let me enable it per-program, and let me
specify _exactly_ where it has permissions, and what sort of pathname
remapping occurs.

content management systems

From: Aaron J. Grier
Date: 09:31 on 07 Jul 2007
Subject: content management systems
part of me likes to make life difficult for myself, insisting on running
old hardware until it won't run anymore, and being a grumpy unix
curmudgeon in general. I can relate to the insect-ridden shaman
described in the unix-hater's handbook. the brave new web 2.0 world is
browser based, and it seems to me like yet another set of buzzing flies
and stinky poo to deal with. I've gotten used to the existing ones,
thanks.
I was asked to look into content management systems on behalf of one of
my club's members, who is interested in redoing our club's website. his
suggestions were drupal, joomla!, and plone.
most CMS systems are built with mysql as a backend, which would be fine,
except that mysql still doesn't run correctly on the alpha architecture.
I don't know if x86-64 is any different, but I get a steady stream of
unaligned access warnings, and flat-out refusal of mysqld to run on my
NetBSD-running alpha. by contrast, postgres just works.
I was ready to kill joomla! straight away since it has an exclamation
mark built-in to its name. "... because open source matters".
obviously portability doesn't matter to joomla!, which only supports
mysql according to the minimum requirements posted at
http://help.joomla.org/content/view/34/279/ .
plone is built around zope. zope so infuriated a friend of mine a while
back that he created http://zope-is-evil-666.idyll.org/ . his
experience in this arena easily trumps mine, which is enough to give me
pause with any project utilizing zobe, but I figured that his objections
had been addressed in the last seven years. however, after reading
further, it appears that plone has its own idea of how databases should
work, and doesn't use a SQL backend out of the box.
http://plone.org/documentation/faq/plone-relational-database
thanks, zopers, but I have better things to do than wank in python.
this left drupal.
drupal's installation was fairly painless: create the database; set up
some rewrite rules in apache; go to the magic drupal page; tell drupal
where the database is; start plugging away. the fact that I had to
configure drupal through the web interface was a warning sign. after
poking through web configuration, it hit me...
drupal is set up for content management entirely through a web
interface.
<insert wincing here>
can't I just edit some templates for layout out of band, post content
from the command line, and have some separation between the input and
output stages of my CMS? web input methods are _STILL_ the simplistic
hack they always were, and the last thing I want to do is handle content
generation WITHIN A WEB BROWSER. I want to view it in a browser, but
not generate it there. I'll edit XML, even. drupal does not appear to
accomodate.
I hate it. I hate all the CMS software I've examined so far. I'd go
back to bashing my stones together and dealing with static content,
except that I really do want to separate content from presentation and
store content in a form which can be indexed in multiple ways.
(symlinks in a filesystem are difficult to manage.) I'd love to tag my
rants, content, and pictures, see RSS feeds on a single page under my
domain, and be able to generate pages based on lookups from a content
store.
wordpress can bite me too. "drop this tarball in a directory and see
what breaks" does not appear to be a good upgrade strategy. (trojanned
distributions are also of some concern.)
it's almost as if everybody who learns PHP goes through a "let's write a
CMS" phase where supplication at the idol of browser is a necessity.
fsck the browser.
if I actually get around to drafting a requirements list for a CMS, and
implementing said system in a compiled language, hell must be a chilly
place indeed...

firefox

dump

From: Aaron J. Grier
Date: 08:08 on 13 Apr 2006
Subject: dump
mt(1) can't differentiate between an unloaded drive and a drive which
has a tape in it but hasn't been ejected yet. maybe this is a hardware
limitiation. I can understand that.
I've got a tape changer. I've got control over it via chio(1). it
works great. I can load and unload tapes from slots and drives. it
blocks if the picker is busy, as desired. however, dump(8) has no way
to integrate with chio(1), other than prompting for the next tape:
DUMP: Is the new volume mounted and ready to go?: ("yes" or "no")
all the IOCTLS exist to completely map the availability of an additional
tape in the library, yet dump has no support for them.
"-e" ejects a tape when a change is required, but since we can't
differentiate between an empty drive and an unloaded drive, this is
useless.
"-l timeout" ejects a tape and waits for the drive to be available
again, "to be used with tape changers which automatically load the next
tape when the tape is ejected." which doesn't apply here, since the
changer isn't of the autofeeding variety.
to get this working as desired it seems like I need to write a wrapper
around dump which parses its output and makes calls out to chio to do
tape changes when necessary.
there's got to be a less hateful way.

yay raid controller

From: Aaron J. Grier
Date: 23:38 on 16 Mar 2006
Subject: yay raid controller
I've got the following in my vintage late 90s alpha 1000A:
mlx0 at pci0 dev 12 function 0: Mylex RAID (v2 interface)
mlx0: interrupting at dec_1000a irq 3
mlx0: DAC960P/PD, 3 channels, firmware 2.70-0-00, 32MB RAM
AKA the DEC KZPSC. it's a three-channel hardware raid controller, and
is wired into a nifty storageworks shelf in the alpha.
I saw that it was supported under NetBSD and decided to actually use it.
first mistake.
switching from SRM to ARC to run the configuration program isn't
completely godawful; I had a monitor and keyboard hooked up when I
configured and initialized my starter 16GB RAID5. no big deal, it
didn't take too long to initialize the array, and the machine wasn't
being used for anything yet, so I could afford downtime. second
mistake.
as old hardware from my alma mater is wont to do, a largish (126GB is
large to me) nstor disk tray made its way into my basement. "wouldn't
it be great to connect this to my hardware RAID controller?" so I
bought the requisite HD68 to HD68 (honda) connectors to wire it up.
third mistake.
by this point I had moved the 1000A off my desk and into my rack, and
given it a proper serial console. I wired everything up, fired up ARC,
and... hey... god how awful this is over a serial console. still, I
trudged along. fourth mistake.
after some missteps involving the internal serverworks shelf being
wired to the same channel as one of the external connectors (even though
the controller has three channels) and figuring out that the nstor box
doesn't need two separate SCSI channels anyway since it only has seven
devices, I got everything ironed out and prepared to configure another
logical device...
it has HD68 connectors but only scans IDs 0-6, I assume since there are
only seven slots in a storageworks shelf. I've got seven drives in the
array, numbered 0-5, and 8. I don't know why I didn't renumber the last
one to 6, but it's not terribly important, since I couldn't create a
logical disk over 32768MB in size. so I ended up creating three
logical disks; two 32.7GB ones, and one leftover. I should have given
up at this point, but I figured I would just concatenate the logical
drives together and just deal. fifth mistake?
it took FOUR HOURS to initialize the logical disks. four hours of
downtime, since the tool is being run out of ARC. oh did I mention that
the firmware is too old for NetBSD's mlxctl to use, and I have a
sneaking suspicion that if I updated it, SRM probably wouldn't be able
to boot off it? (I may still replace the firmware and see what
happens.)
meanwhile I've got a nice 64bit LSI 53c1010 controller here that I wish
I would've used in the first place...

broken MTAs

From: Aaron J. Grier
Date: 00:22 on 08 Oct 2005
Subject: broken MTAs
the head of marketing (my mother-in-law, unfortunately,) decided to send
a newsletter to a few dozen of our international distributors. fine.
not a big deal. they actually expect this, are opt-in, and that
situation alone is all copacetic.
my mother-in-law is (still) not terribly computer-savvy, and put ~80
recipients directly in the To: line. this leaks unnecessary
information, but other than being an annoyance is not normally a
technical problem.
unfortunately one of the recipient's email handlers in sweden apparently
has a buffer overflow problem and for whatever reason has decided that
it needs to resend this newsletter to all ~80 recipients, I assume since
they're on the To: line. it seems to die somewhere in the process, and
at last count some recipients had received 20 copies of the newsletter,
which included a 88K pdf attachment.
this busted swedish mailer is also preserving the original envelope
sender, meaning that secondary failures are also being bounced back.
hate hate hate.

automatic bug reporting

From: Aaron J. Grier
Date: 07:00 on 30 Sep 2005
Subject: automatic bug reporting
I don't run thunderbird. but a friend of mine does.
thunderbird is crashing during exit, which throws up a dialogue box
which must be attended to.
"do you really want to exit?"